Gas utilities may have priorities that drive up costs for ratepayers, run counter to climate goals, and don’t fit with lessening demand for fossil fuels. Carra Sahler, director of Lewis & Clark’s Green Energy Institute, explains how technology, policy, and cultural context are pushing utility regulators in Oregon and other states to be more skeptical of gas utilities’ infrastructure proposals.
05/17/2024Across the country, demand for mental health care is at an all-time high, yet we lack enough qualified mental health practitioners. Recognizing that decades of underinvestment in the mental health workforce has contributed to this problem, the Oregon Health Authority is providing grant funds to Lewis & Clark for scholarships for mental health counseling students. As Dr. Cort Dorn-Medeiros, chair of Lewis & Clark’s Department of Counseling, Therapy, and School Psychology, notes, “This is the investment we need. If you want more mental-health practitioners, especially those going to work for nonprofit agencies in medical settings, supporting them through their education” is key.
05/10/2024For half a century, student protestors at campuses across the US have called for divestment related to a variety of political issues. But how effective is this strategy? Lewis & Clark Professors Cliff Bekar and Bruce Podobnik explain why divestment may not deliver the economic and political effects that proponents seek.
05/06/2024When farmers, conservationists, and other neighbors noticed an unusual pit being dug in Marion County, they notified the authorities about possible illegal dumping. Lewis & Clark Environmental Law Professor Craig Johnston explains why the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has ordered the dump site to be shut down.
05/05/2024Food waste makes up the largest component of garbage in the Portland metro region – with huge environmental consequences. Lewis & Clark partners with COR Disposal and Recycling, a minority-owned certified B-corporation (and operator of Oregon’s first all-electric garbage truck), to repurpose our food waste. “Sustainability, really, is about leaving the planet and leaving our community in a better way than we found it,” said Amy Dvorak, Lewis & Clark’s sustainability director. COR is not only our waste-hauler. They also help educate our students about the green economy. “They come and talk with my sustainability and entrepreneurship class, really inspiring students to see a business that’s modeled around having a positive impact in our communities,” said Dvorak.
Oregon Public Broadcasting profiles Alicia Ouellette, the incoming dean of Lewis & Clark’s Law School. Dean Jennifer Johnson, who is stepping down after a decade leading our Law School, increased the school’s endowment by more than 52%. Ouellette, the former president and dean of Albany Law School in New York, looks forward to building on this success. As OPB reports, she is “excited to see how the law school engages with the city and the community and to grow those connections.”
04/26/2024World renowned artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle spent ten days in residence at Lewis & Clark’s EAR (Experimental Art Research) Forest. The resulting work leaves audiences “full of admiration for Sprinkle and Stephens and the Lewis & Clark Faculty who work as both artists and academics, making space to be in life-changing relation to students,” according to art critic Hannah Krafcik. “Amidst the pressure cooker of the brewing climate crisis, this whole experience at EAR Forest offered a breath of fresh air.”
04/25/2024As the affordable housing crisis takes hold across large cities, small towns, suburban areas, and rural counties, some communities are imposing penalties on people who are living outside. The Supreme Court is currently considering a challenge to the way Grants Pass, a town in southern Oregon, is penalizing unhoused people. Lewis & Clark Professor Tung Yin explains the Constitutional issues at the heart of the case.
04/22/2024Scientists are increasingly finding evidence of sentience – conscious thought or experience – among insects, fish, and other creatures. This understanding of consciousness across species has important legal implications, notes Lewis & Clark Professor Raj Reedy. Currently, federal law does not classify animals as sentient, according to Reddy. Instead, laws pertaining to animals focus primarily on conservation, agriculture or their treatment by zoos, research laboratories, and pet retailers. Recognizing sentience might lead to different judicial opinions in cases that involve or effect these creatures.
04/19/2024
Colleges and universities rely on the returns from investing their endowments. But many schools make those investments without addressing the issues that will shape students’ lives for decades to come. That’s why the Intentional Endowments Network created their new Endowment Impact Benchmark to gauge institutions’ progress on social and environmental objectives. Using the EIB, they gave the highest marks to Lewis & Clark, the only institution to achieve a platinum award. Earning the platinum rating “is a gratifying validation of Lewis & Clark College’s dedication to sustainability and principled action in our investing approach,” says Andrea Dooley, L&C’s chief financial officer and vice president of operations.
04/18/2024Every year, policy experts from around the world debate in person at Lewis & Clark’s International Affairs Symposium. But it’s not just the students who learn from these events. As civil discourse deteriorates in many places across our country and the world, IAS provides a space in which even those with drastically opposing views can engage, as Todd Miller notes. “I enjoyed my time with the students and professors and sensed genuine engagement and curiosity about the issues, including the ever-polemic border.” He even credited listening to John Bolton, someone with whom he vehemently disagrees, as providing him the insights he will weave into the conclusion of his next book. Miller credits his time at L&C with imbuing him with “an ability to courageously look across borders and actually be curious and engaged, and to listen to what people are saying. That was my indirect lesson from Bolton: maybe it is by listening, rather than talking, that debates are actually won.”
04/11/2024Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is open about his admiration of the late-ninteenth-century Mexican revolutionary Catarino Erasmo Garza. Lewis & Clark Professor Elliott Young, who wrote a biography about Garza, argues that if López Obrador wants to emulate his hero, he should remember that Garza fought for a democratic Mexico, one in which people would not be subject to state violence, and journalists and citizens would be free to criticize their government.
04/09/2024Native American women are overrepresented in U.S. prisons, and among “juvenile” prisoners, Native American girls are incarcerated at a rate more than four times that of their white girls. Lewis & Clark Professor Carma Corcoran (Cree), director of the Indian Law Program, explains the structural factors leading to these disparities, and what should be done to address them.
04/09/2024What’s the best way to learn – and teach – about science, history, social studies, and racial justice? In places that elucidate how those things connect. This story offered NPR listeners a chance to join Lewis & Clark Professors Liza Finkel and Cari Zall and their graduate students for an exploration of the natural and human environments in one Portland neighborhood shaped by years of environmental racism. The L&C students, who will teach science and social studies in schools throughout the region, were deepening their skills for designing place-based learning, for collaborating across the curriculum, and for bringing a social justice lens to every lesson. “When you have local, real examples of how these different things interplay and affect people’s lives, I think that’s really powerful,” Jordan Stokes, one of the L&C graduate students, said. “I think that connects and makes [our students] want to learn more.”
04/08/2024Grizzly bear populations have recently increased. But does that mean the species is no longer endangered? It’s a scientific and also a legal question. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is reviewing the listing status under the Endangered Species Act of two populations of grizzlies. But Lewis & Clark Professor Daniel Rohlf notes that it’s impossible to make a completely objective scientific determination when it comes to recovery of a species. “It’s up to society to make that call. How protective—how risk adverse do we want to be?”
04/05/2024When Dr Auxillia Mnangagwa, the First Lady of Zimbabwe, celebrated World Aquatic Animal Day by advocating for coordinating socio-cultural, economic, and scientific efforts to protect ecosystems, her audience understood how Lewis & Clark contributed to the conservation. World Aquatic Animal Day “is the brainchild of the aquatic animal law initiative at Lewis & Clark Law School.” Although Zimbabwe has marked the event in past years, in 2024 leaders seized on the event “to take advantage of every available tool to enhance conservation efforts in Zimbabwe.”
04/04/2024Dunkin’ Donuts charges customers extra for nondairy milk in their coffee drinks. But a lawsuit filed recently in California contends that these charges violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, because food allergies can be considered a disability. As Lewis & Clark Professor Rajesh Reddy explains, the difference in cost between dairy and nondairy products reflects how the government subsidizes the dairy industry. “With every cup of morning Joe, it’s the dairy industry Americans are bailing out. Just how much the federal government — and taxpayers by extension — subsidize the industry is a little-known fact, and its implications are mind-boggling.” By keeping dairy prices artificially low, demand for dairy increases while smaller producers deal with higher production costs and lower demand. “You couldn’t come up with an inherently more unlevel playing field if you tried.”
04/03/2024As discriminatory laws were being imposed on Japanese Americans during World War II, Minoru Yasui intentionally violated a racially targeted curfew law he knew was unconstitutional. As a result, Yasui’s citizenship was temporarily stripped, and he spent nearly a year in solitary confinement in jail, and then was held in incarceration camps until the end of World War II. Lewis & Clark Law School graduate Peggy Nagae worked with Yasui in the 1980s to reopen his case, and his convictions were overturned. Nagae continues to commemorate Yasui’s courageous commitment to civil rights, leading to him being posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and to March 28 being declared Minoru Yasui Day in Oregon.
03/28/2024It’s not fair to ask a student and their family to commit to a particular college before they know how much it will cost to attend. But with the problems in rolling out the new FAFSA application this year, millions of American families are facing that challenge. As Nick Anderson at the American Council on Education notes, Lewis & Clark has led the way in creating a fix to meet students’ needs, by extending the deadline for students to accept our offer of admission until June 1. “Colleges should do their best to give families breathing room to make good choices,” says Anderson – and Lewis & Clark definitely agrees.
03/26/2024In 2022, a white supremacist killed ten people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. A judge has allowed a lawsuit accusing social media companies of promoting content that radicalized the shooter to move forward. As Lewis & Clark Professor Matthew P. Bergman explains, “This historic ruling will for the first-time permit victims of racist, antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and homophobic violence to hold social media companies accountable for contributing to the epidemic of mass shootings that are plaguing our nation.” According to Bergman, who founded Social Media Victims Law Center and is representing several of the families in the suit, the case reveals how dangerous online content can be. “Social media companies purposefully designed their products to be addictive to young users like the Buffalo shooter and the artificial intelligence driven algorithms that radicalized him to commit unspeakable acts of racist violence at Tops Friendly Markets were foreseeable consequences of their intentional design decisions. These companies need to be held accountable for the role in radicalizing people resulting in all these mass shootings across America.”
03/19/2024Lewis & Clark alum Aron Ouzilevski lives in Tblisi, Georgia, and writes about people who are resisting Russian authoritarianism. When he met an indigenous Karachay (an ethnic group from the North Caucasus) who works with NGOs that focus on LBGTQ+ and women’s rights in Central Asia and the North Caucasus, he was surprised to discover that she had also spent time at Lewis & Clark. “It was at once comforting and strange for me to share memories about running across a wooden bridge over a ravine to make it on time to an early class, about the incessant rain and about the rare, clear views of Mt. Hood’s snowy peak with a new acquaintance halfway around the world,” Ouzilevski notes. Even more surprising is how the Karachay woman (whose name is not given for safety reasons) describes gaining a deeper understanding of her own identity and culture while at Lewis & Clark.
03/18/2024In 2020, Oregon voters passed Measure 110, intending to replace the war on drugs with a focus on addiction treatment. Less than three years later, the legislature and governor have dismantled much of the measure. Lewis & Clark faculty member Rob Bovett and co-author Keith Humphreys argue that the law failed because its fundamentally misunderstood the nature of addiction.
03/17/2024Lawsuits against food giants, such as food manufacturers and fast food chains, are on the rise nationwide. As Lewis & Clark Professor Joyce Tischler explains, these suits arise because consumers seek to support companies that align with their values, such as environmentally conscious farming practices or humane treatment of animals. But too often, companies can be misleading about whether their practices and products really meet these marks. In those cases, Tischler notes, a lawsuit “forces the producer, this massive company that’s making a lot of money, to be honest with the public, to tell the truth.”
03/14/2024Across the US, passing the state bar exam is a professional rite of passage – and sometimes a huge barrier – for law school graduates. But starting May 15, Oregon will offer a Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination (SPPE) for those studying law, creating a different pathway for lawyers to obtain their license in the state. Lewis & Clark Professor and Associate Law School Dean John Parry, who worked with colleagues across Oregon to create the SPPE, explains that this alternative focuses on “practicing law in Oregon, learning Oregon law and applying Oregon law” in significant new ways. As a result, Parry says, Oregon lawyers, courts, and the public can have “a greater degree of confidence that licensing is going to be related to what lawyers do.”
03/14/2024